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mpicpp sends word that the Wikimedia Foundation is updating its Terms of Use to keep track of editors who are paid for the changes they make. This follows last fall's discovery that a small industry had arisen around public relations firms running Wikipedia editing campaigns for paying clients. The Foundation now says, "If you are paid to edit, you will need to disclose your paid editing to comply with the new Terms of Use. You need to add your affiliation to your edit summary, user page, or talk page, to fairly disclose your perspective. ... Specific policies on individual Wikimedia projects, or relevant laws in your country (such as those prohibiting fraudulent advertising), may require further disclosure or prohibit paid advocacy editing altogether." They add, "undisclosed paid advocacy editing is a black hat practice that can threaten the trust of Wikimedia’s volunteers and readers."

this is most probably so if editors who are caught doing stuff when being paid for it and not disclosing it can have all that they have done removed without the need to do a investigation if what they wrote is truth or not

You can't restrict this to just political party affiliation. Most 3 letter government agencies pay for edits under various programs, each as potentially nefarious as the former.

Try correcting something on the Sarin Gas page for example (I had this edit war personally) where someone from a Government IP address last year added a statement that "Assad and Syria were proven to have used Sarin on it's own population". The UN investigations have repeatedly shown that the FSA rebels have used chemical weapons against the populace, and the FSA has been caught smuggling materials from Turkey on several occasions. The UN has never ever concluded that Assad or the Syrian army has done any such thing.

After making a simple correction to "The US alleges" the edit war was on, and every day a new Government IP would have new edits attempting to make it appear factual that Assad had used Sarin on the Syrian population. Every day I would remove and correct information. I don't get paid to edit, so gave up after about a month. It was simply too much time to invest. This is one of many pages edited purely for propaganda purposes by the US Government (ARIN [whois] is free to use, so you can easily see what agency is making edits, even when anonymously).

Yeah, he meant on their assertion that "Assad and Syria were proven to have used Sarin on it's own population" you should have appended it with [citation needed]. Would have thought a Wikipedia editor would have gotten that one...

You are right. Wikipedia should have better rules and checks against propaganda and manipulation from whatever source it may be, or it will become increasingly irrelevant and unreliable for anything that is related to History or Politics.

I'd normally think that's the case, but judging from the various outbursts you've made on Slashdot by simply misunderstanding what others are saying and a clear ignorance of contextual etiquette, it's very possible that your side of the story isn't particularly accurate. Unless you provide direct links to the 'edit war' discussion, you're not really making a point.

this is most probably so if editors who are caught doing stuff when being paid for it and not disclosing it can have all that they have done removed without the need to do a investigation if what they wrote is truth or not

They should also black-list the payers of this type of activity. A week or two for each infraction. There's one important aspect about Wikipedia and that is it isn't about marketing and selling shit. They have the rest of the entire Internet for that, so it shouldn't be tolerated.

this is most probably so if editors who are caught doing stuff when being paid for it and not disclosing it can have all that they have done removed without the need to do a investigation if what they wrote is truth or not

They should also black-list the payers of this type of activity. A week or two for each infraction. There's one important aspect about Wikipedia and that is it isn't about marketing and selling shit. They have the rest of the entire Internet for that, so it shouldn't be tolerated.

Perhaps a dire warning should appear in banner form at the top of any article about a company that pays shills to edit Wikipedia stating that it has been caught doing so, and that information about that company on Wikipedia portraying it in a positive light can't be trusted.

Perhaps a dire warning should appear in banner form at the top of any article about a company that pays shills to edit Wikipedia stating that it has been caught doing so, and that information about that company on Wikipedia portraying it in a positive light can't be trusted.

Wikipedia editors have all sorts of biases. When an article is popular enough to get the attention of lots of editors, there usually are enough to keep it from becoming too crazy.

But start dipping into the more esoteric subjects on Wikipedia, and you're bound to encounter little "fiefdoms" where an editor or a small group have established their domain of truth. It's not so much that they don't have adequately sourced information most of the time, as the sources they use are not indicative of current sch

That wikipedia is taken seriously as a source of information still astounds me.

It depends entirely on the topic. Want to know about some mathematical concept, it usually works just fine. Some non-controversial historical fact, again, it usually works just fine. Want to know about something that is a politicized issue, good luck, although still possibly a better source than the news shows where many get their info.

Here's a hint: look at the references, they are often an indicator of the quality of the page and a great source of additional information.

That wikipedia is taken seriously as a source of information still astounds me.

What's astounding is how valuable and reliable a resource Wikipedia has become.

I know people love to scoff at Wikipedia (especially when they're losing arguments) but the fact remains that as a "source of information", this free website that allows anyone to edit posts has become the most useful and important reference resource the world has ever known.

Wikipedia is a hell of a lot more transparent than any encyclopedia ever published, and as long as you realize that Wikipedia is the beginning of your research, not the end, it will never steer you wrong. What's surprising is that the same people who look down their noses at Wikipedia probably believe that the Encyclopedia Britannica was an accurate source of unbiased information.

It remains living proof that the "crowd" can make something awesome and that free can be great.. Even the people who scoff at the idea of Wikipedia and who love to tell you who that they can't believe anyone uses Wikipedia use it regularly. And if they find information that goes against their own beliefs, they can always tell themselves, "Well, it's just Wikipedia" and can go on believing whatever crap they were going to keep believing no matter what information they were given.

I'm trying to think of a readily available reference that's ever been as useful as Wikipedia, and I'm not coming up with anything. Maybe someone can offer a suggestion?

Ah, now archive.org is a wonderful site, that I have supported for years. However, it is not as comprehensive as Wikipedia and is limited to material that is in the "public domain" or has Creative Commons licensing. I can not look up the spellings of pre-Columbian Mayan rulers on archive.org. But if I need footage from a 1947 documentary on ant colonies shot by one of the greatest nature cinematographers of all time and want to download it so I could edit the footage into a home-brewed monster movie, Arc

you could say it's among the most expensive and least reliable ways to collect information.

You could, but it would make you sound foolish to anyone born before 1990. Public information is messy, uncertain, and contradictory no matter what the format, sorting the shit from the clay is a teachable skill. Bitching about a search engine not handing you the answer you want on a silver platter won't improve your skills, it just gives you an excuse to wallow in your ignorance.

That wikipedia is taken seriously as a source of information still astounds me.

What's astounding is how valuable and reliable a resource Wikipedia has become.

There's a difference between accurate and reliable. Wikipedia's accuracy, overall, is astoundingly good for a crowd-sourced entity. Wikipedia's reliability, on the other hand, is TERRIBLE.

Why? Because it's the encyclopedia that "anyone can edit." The whole conception of Wikipedia was great, and we've built up this amazing base of reasonably good information. But it's constantly fighting against the "barbarians at the gates." From the petty squabbles, wiki-lawyering, and edit wars to the constant barrage of vandalism and spam, it's a wonder the damn thing appears as "together" as it is on any given day.

But if you start to look hard, you see the cracks. Anyone who uses Wikipedia on a regular basis has seen random vandalism. I've seen vandals who have fun just changing random digits in dates or something. It's insane. Say all you want about Encyclopedia Britannica's errors, but it is relatively stable -- when you opened the book the next time, it wouldn't have randomly inserted typographical errors and deliberate mistakes thrown in.

Wikipedia is a hell of a lot more transparent than any encyclopedia ever published, and as long as you realize that Wikipedia is the beginning of your research, not the end, it will never steer you wrong.

Except when you happen upon a page in the middle of vandalism or some stupid edit war and see something that's completely misleading. Back when I used to edit Wikipedia occasionally, I'd go looking for the stuff. It's much more common than you'd think, and every new bot they create to try to keep things clean is fighting a useless war against stupidity.

It remains living proof that the "crowd" can make something awesome and that free can be great.. Even the people who scoff at the idea of Wikipedia and who love to tell you who that they can't believe anyone uses Wikipedia use it regularly.

I don't scoff at Wikipedia, but I don't believe a damn thing I read on it until I've verified it elsewhere. Too many random edits and too many encounters with all sorts of vandalism have taught me to be suspicious.

I'm trying to think of a readily available reference that's ever been as useful as Wikipedia, and I'm not coming up with anything.

How about a BETTER Wikipedia? If we truly have achieved this great resource, isn't it time to change the rules? What works best to grow your mom-and-pop restaurant into a small chain over a few years isn't necessarily the way to stay on top as a stable global business over a period of decades. It's time to lock down good pages on relatively stable topics, verify expert editors and get them to oversee future changes.

I'm all in favor of allowing anyone to still submit suggested edits, but maybe they could be on some other version of the page than the default that most people see from search engines -- the "unstable" or "experimental" bleeding-edge version. And consensus of knowledgable editors can move suggested changes to the "stable" version when they are justified.

That's the only way you're ever going to get something that's actually "reliable," to use your term. Right now, there's way too much time spent by volunteers fighting back the barbarians at the gates (and often new volunteers who are unfamiliar with Wikipedia's convention and stumble into random disputes or fights without knowing it... and thus are driven away). Instead, that energy could be focused on creating a stable, established baseline version, without worrying that any new IP address showing up could be trying to destroy what others have created.

Wikipedia is okay, but it could be great. But it reached a plateau in terms of administrative function maybe 5-7 years ago. It's time to move onto the next stage.

There is no freely-available resource anywhere that can match Wikipedia for accuracy and reliability.

Ah, "freely-available" -- changing the rules, now, are we? Before it was "readily available."

Anyhow, sure there is -- if you're willing to restrict stuff to smaller subsets of knowledge. For example, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [stanford.edu] is, hands-down, the BEST encyclopedic resource on topics in philosophy. It's free, and it predates Wikipedia by quite a few years.

It's much more accurate and reliable than equivalent articles on Wikipedia, because it's stable and overseen by experts, and the articl

What's astounding is how valuable and reliable a resource Wikipedia has become.

Which makes it more dangerous, not less.

I've written a paper on information warfare years ago, and in my research everything points towards generally reliable mediums being the best attack vectors, because you don't fact-check them as carefully as if you know that you can't rely on it.

Small but important changes in an otherwise reliable article are the best way to spread misinformation. If you can do it in an otherwise reliable encyclopedia - perfect.

If I were being paid by someone to distort a specific fact in the public consciousness, Wikipedia is such a perfect vehicle to do just that, it's almost as if it were designed for that purpose.

It might be, if it wasn't so dead easy to undo any damage.

Somebody puts some misinformation on Wikileaks. There is a record of who posted and when. Others revert back to the original. The crook tries to post misinformation again and pretty soon all of their edits are undone.

If you do this professionally, you spend time to get a good reputation, you create some secondary sources you can then link to, then hide your actual change in a bigger edit. Then you have a few sockpuppets starting an edit war so that your change gets buried in the history and a second admin account you or a collaborator control swoops in to save the day, restores back to the last "good" edit before the edit war (yours) and locks the page for protection.

I trust hundreds of thousands of eyes working in a transparent manner a lot more than a handful working in a completely proprietary, opaque manner.

If you do this professionally, you spend time to get a good reputation, you create some secondary sources you can then link to, then hide your actual change in a bigger edit. Then you have a few sockpuppets starting an edit war so that your change gets buried in the history and a second admin account you or a collaborator control swoops in to save the day, restores back to the last "good" edit before the edit war (yours) and locks the page for protection.

Except you still have thousands of people, thousands of voices calling "bullshit" and asking for citations.

ROTFL. Maybe in an article about a porn star or manga character. Even articles about entire countries are largely edited by less than a dozen people. On more specific topics that require expertise, there are many pages that have two or three editors. Many articles are so much pets of individual editors that even spelling corrections get reverted - a quite common complaint of casual WP editors.

Once more, we've believed in this "enough eyeballs" shit in Open Source software for many years, and Heartbleed was

this "anyone" only sounds scary, until you realize that most mainstream information sources are produced and editted by the worst of people, for the worst of reasons. The worst possible sceneario for wikipedia are the form of scum who run traditional media(world wide, please thing of who runs most media sources world wide), showing up an engaging in edit wars, like we see now.

But lets face it traditional media, is all the scum, without any honest regular joes.

Pulling up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... [wikipedia.org] in the comfort and safety of my own home was heaps easier and cheaper than going to a bar where I'd be any chance at all to get useful info regarding that topic, especially when you figure in the airfare to Beijing and back.

BTW, you're aware that "lookout" is a noun, and "look out" is a verb, and that they're even pronounced differently, right?

Following your logic leads directly to absurdity, we don't throw away laws against murder and rape just because some portion of rapists and murderers are never caught. The new rule enables WP to expel paid propagandists when they are caught breaking the new rule. Besides the absurdity of your argument, you're also creating a strawman since nobody is claiming the new rule will catch everyone who breaks it.

The new rule enables WP to expel paid propagandists when they are caught breaking the new rule.

Jimmy W could do that now, without needing a "rule", justifying it simply by an appeal to common decency. Where else in life do we consider undisclosed paid placement of promotional content even remotely kosher?

But then, if Jimbo cared in the least about anything but donations at this point, he'd have already permabanned the literally hundreds of "editors" who contribute nothing more than edit wars over sing

I used to try to contribute, but for this very reason I don't anymore. I already have to deal with self-important busybodies in things that I'm required to do, I'm not going to deal with them in things that are supposed to be enjoyable pastimes.

Same here. Even on articles about supposedly non-controversial subjects like vintage consumer-electronic devices, I got fed up with constantly having to defend my edits from being reverted or superceded by people who insisted that my contributions constituted "original research" or "personal recollections" because there was no link to a supporting source, even though my source was the actual service or user manual for the device in question. The reason there's no link? Because there was no "interwebs" ba

The original complaint was citing offline sources (because of course, nothing *ever* existed prior to the internet, and who cares about stuff printed on dead trees, amirite?) like service manuals, articles in consumer-electronics and hobbyist magazines of the era, and so on.

So, since I had those materials in my possession (else, how could I have cited page numbers and publication dates?), I scanned them, put them up on a web site, then linked to them. At that point, the complaints became that I was "using"

And what about Russian or Chinese hordes of biased editors paid by their governments? They plague not only comment section of pretty much any mainstream news website, but also Wikipedia as well. Try for example the WWII [wikipedia.org] article -- it's so full of paeans of praise for the Soviet Union that someone who doesn't know better would take them for heroes who almost single-handedly liberated the world.

Well, the Soviets were the ones who did most of the killing and dying in the Allies side of the conflict. I wouldn't call it "liberating" anything, though. Both USA and USSR significantly expanded their influence after the Allies victory, and the Axis would've done the same had it won.

And when it comes to loyalty to their new "allies" after the switch, how would you call shooting at English and American planes trying to help the Warsaw Uprising if they tried to go over Soviet-held territory, not even speaking about refueling there?

Russkies were a third side in the war, their relation to the free world was at most an uneasy truce because of a common enemy.

As has often been said, Hitler fought the wrong war when he headed East, he had much more in common with Stalin than he did with Winston Churchill

Sorry, but this is just parroting propaganda.

Fascism and Communism are polar opposites. Don't get confused that they're both authoritarian. Hitler and Stalin had very little in common. Hitler original plan was to go to war with the Soviet union in 1942, they honestly never expected Western Europe to go to war over Poland.

The Nazi's considered western European people to be of similar aryan stock to Germany, it was the Slavs and Russians they considered to be untermesh (spelling, German isn't my strong

[citation needed] since EVERY source I've ever read says, when used generically, seasons are lower case. The only time they are capitalized is when they are the first word of a sentence, in a title, or used as a proper noun (Summer Olympics, Fall 2012 Semester, etc).

Hey editors, when Fall in a sentence refers to the season, it's capitalized.

Mod parent way way up! It's absolutely false in this context, so, in the proud Slashdot tradition, it deserves to be modded +5, Informative so that all the nerds can proudly trumpet yet more misinformation to the world!

The policy still doesn't make clear if an employee of a company always counts as a "paid contributor" if their job duties do not involve Wikipedia and they can expect no payment, recognition, etc. from their employer for their activities. Is that considered a "volunteer edit" or would my mere paycheck make me a "paid contributor"?

Same goes for so-called 'volunteers' especially in the religious circles. There are those that get room and board, work for the corporation yet do not get paid a paycheck. And especially for articles on the high-control cults (Jehovah's Witnesses, Scientology,...) there are a number of editors that are clearly associated with the corporation reverting every sort of edit unless the information is disseminated from the 'mothership'.

We have wars going on all over wikipedia due to different views and beliefs that far outweigh the business and pr companies.Many non paid editors have very in-depth political viewpoints, and they attack other groups reporting on information in articles they disagree with.

The worst I've seen are the feminists against male rape statistics and anything male related. I can only assume its because colleges promote such a militant viewpoint on feminism it runs over into other areas of sexual statistics and thus becomes political.

I've seen many editors who are members of originations who delete anything that could be considered a counter argument with the established, but can often be incorrect due to education and their circle of influence related to their school or organization.

Another example. An amateur historian who would find common misconceptions and provide articles to show the common viewpoint is not correct by using government links. Many editors that are enrolled in college history courses would remove his work. He finally just used his personal page and put up the corrections so at least they are online. The point was he was correction known flaws taught in higher education with GOVERNMENT backed evidence.

It sickens me, that the truth can be deleted by editors with agendas. I've seen the history re-written due to lack of publications of news and tv reportings that are from the early 80's and older. But we can have entire animated tv show episodes articles with great detail, as thats the level of knowledge as historically important.

This is why we need all magazines and newspapers online also, the history and reporting of opnion is harder to argue when the only source is wikipedia.

It sickens me, that the truth can be deleted by editors with agendas. I've seen the history re-written due to lack of publications of news and tv reportings that are from the early 80's and older. But we can have entire animated tv show episodes articles with great detail, as thats the level of knowledge as historically important.

It's not there because it is important, the trivia is there because it's not in dispute and backed up by third party references. Isn't plain facts regardless of seriousness the perfect kind of information to put on Wikipedia? It's far more structured and cohesive than using Google, it rarely shows up unless it's what you're looking for and it's not like the encyclopedia is going to run out of pages or balloon the printing costs. And most importantly, it wouldn't help. Nobody who wants to write about Pokemon

The problem isnt plan facts, its the missing facts editors delete. And the issue are not what facts are deleted, its the reasons behind the deletions.

Take politics, the theme now is to direct the narative in news. This is what is being done in articles, its not facts, its a view of the facts from a group with interests. This is the reason they dont want paid editors, they change the narative.

One mans terrrorist is another mans freedom fighter. Its the narative.

I write technical documentation for a specialised and fairly complex software product. There are not many people who are qualified to do so.

Assuming that I stick to the facts, provide citations, and don't attempt to hide the fact of my employment with the producer of this software from anyone, is there some other potential reason why I shouldn't contribute to Wikipedia articles about this product?

Since, as part of my job (which includes very flexible hours/locations), I'm encouraged to blog, take part in mailing list/forum discussions, and suchlike, it could be argued that they're paying me for my Wikipedia edits about their product as well.

Dunno why I'm trying to play Devil's Advocate here, but there ya go.

OTOH, I am pretty sure that the folks in Legal would say that I'm definitely not being paid to do marketing or to post inaccurate information.

I don't spend much work time there (except to look stuff up)--haven't made any edits there in a couple of months, but would probably want to do some updates when our next major release comes out later this year.

As for whether I'm any good or not--that's debatable, but I was lucky enough to land on a team with one of the best reputations in the business, and I like to think I know which side the b

I mention my Wikipedia activities in the "Other interests" section of my CV but I'm always worried that employers will misinterpret it as an offer to polish their image. With this rule change, if an employer does ask me to "Hey, since you know how this wiki thing works, can you correct some stuff?" I can say that I could but I'd have to declare it as being paid work.

That'll make them less interested, so I'm less likely to get put in that situation to begin with.

(Some other comments rubbished the idea because it won't get 100% compliance but they're missing the point. Improvement is improvement.)